"I lived in New York for 10 years... Every time I was having, like, a cool moment; cut my bangs, I got a leather jacket, Spoon came on," says Grouplove's Hannah Hooper during their recent What's In My Bag? interview. She's talking about Spoon's beloved fourth album Kill The Moonlight, which features the now classic "The Way We Get By." The vocalist/keyboardist wryly continues, "we're parents now so we need...a lot of leather jackets in our life."

Los Angeles indie rockers Grouplove formed in 2009 after the members met at the Ikarus artist commune in Crete. The band released a self-titled EP in 2010, heading out on tour as the support act for Florence and the Machine and The Joy Formidable that same year. Grouplove signed to Canvasback/Atlantic Records, who reissued the band's breakthrough EP in January 2011. Soon afterward, Grouplove embarked on a co-headlining tour with Foster the People and played Lollapalooza and Glastonbury.

Canadian R&B/pop singer and songwriter Alessia Cara was recently at Amoeba Hollywood looking for some cool new records and we got a chance to chat with her for our "What's In My Bag?" series. Take, for instance, Amy Winehouse's debut album, Frank, which is one of Cara's all-time favorite albums. "It's just a really interesting mixture of jazz and hip hop." The first track, "Stronger Than Me," especially stood out to Cara. "The entire album is beautiful, I love it," she says.

Alessia Cara began her career by performing covers of popular songs on YouTube. She attracted the attention of Def Jam, who released her official debut single, "Here," in 2015. Her debut full-length studio album, Know-It-All, appeared later that year, with "Here" landing the singer her first top-five Billboard single.

That same year, she made her first appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. In 2016, she took home the award for Breakthrough Artist of the Year at the Juno Awards. After touring with Coldplay in the first half of 2016, she then embarked on her own solo headlining tour of North America. She was nominated for the BET Awards 2016 Best New Artist and the American Music Awards 2016 New Artist of the Year.

Brooklyn’s Diiv are back after four years with an album that delivers on the promise of their debut, Oshin. Musically, Zachary Cole Smith and co. still dole out shimmering guitar-pop nuggets that surf on waves of reverb and atmospheric distortion. Songs like “Under the Sun” offer a pure rush of new wave beats and summery melodies, even as Smith’s lyrics delve into his struggle with addiction. It follows one of The Cure’s best tricks: sounding lively even at their bleakest. Songs like “Dopamine” are far from numbed out — Smith’s jaunty vocal is as close as he’d let himself get to Tom Petty, while still encased in a fog of reverb. Is The Is Are is a bit sprawling at 17 tracks, and after a dynamite opening, some of its shorter tracks in the middle don’t sink in, compared with the relatively taut Oshin. But that also gives Is The Is Are room to roam and the feeling of some alt-rock record of yore, like a Guided By Voices or Sonic Youth album (speaking of the latter, Smith’s girlfriend, Sky Ferreira, shows up to play Kim Gordon on the breathy “Blue Boredom”). Smith also should get credit for expanding his guitar palette while keeping things trim and stylistically consistent, adding My Bloody Valentine-style bends and distortion to his crisp, Felt-ish tones only when necessary. As layers of heavily distorted riffs close out “Waste of Breath” like interlocking corroded piping (epic by Diiv standards at nearly six minutes), Smith’s talents are firmly re-established.

In the video for her song "Go," featuring Blood Diamonds, Grimes goes all Mad Max/Final Fantasy on us with swords and veils in the desert. But then also at the club. 'Cause after all, this was a song Grimes had written for RIhanna but that got turned down. Pretty lame, it would have been nice to hear Rihanna try something different like this, but it sounds great coming from Grimes, too. The song is available to download now from Amoeba.com.